


the princess and the pauper

by thelabours



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: An AU of Sorts, Gen, Magical setting, Natsu is a princess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-17
Updated: 2017-05-17
Packaged: 2018-11-01 22:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10931706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelabours/pseuds/thelabours
Summary: in which Kageyama accidentally finds a lost princess and has to help her find her way home.





	the princess and the pauper

**Author's Note:**

> i saw a prompt on tumblr which went something like: "A person sees a little girl dressed in a cheap disny princess outfit who tells them she's a princess of a kingdom and commands them to help her find her way home."
> 
> yeah i mean sounds riveting as fuck if anyone knows where it's from pl e a se for the love of disney link it to me thank you

Kageyama has had a bad day.

A terrible day. No good. Absolutely, 100% organically awful.

It had begun with rain. This morning, when he woke up, everything was a muted shade of grey. On the brink of winter, this wasn’t quite what he’d been expecting.

What he _did_ expect was for his alarm clock to wake him up on time. Which it _didn’t_. And so, Kageyama was _late_ for work.

Picking up a shirt from the floor, he sniffs it, gauging whether or not it was too stinky to wear in public. _8:04_ flashes on the clock. _Traitor_ , Kageyama thinks. He pulls the shirt on and wears a jacket on top. Hopefully, no one will notice the smell.

Kageyama’s roommate, Oikawa, doesn’t like to think of them as poor, he calls it optimised living by upcycling. Kageyama calls bullshit.

Oikawa, in Kageyama’s not-so-esteemed opinion, is a bag of dicks with a bad personality. He waltzes in and out whenever he likes, and forgets that he has to cook three nights a week.

Like yesterday, and now Kageyama has no leftovers to heat up. _Fuck this. Fuck his life._ He picks up a pack of strawberry milk at the station. Things happen one after another. The train is late. He finally gets to work at 9:30. His boss is in a mood. He gets fired.

His socks are wet because he forgot to grab his umbrella while leaving.

His hands nearly crushed the milk pack he was angrily sipping from because that’s just _not fair_. Today sucked and it isn’t even noon yet.

He picks up his cardboard box of meagre belongings and turns towards the station. There’s nothing left to do but go home and figure out his job situation.

Among the many many people on the escalator, he spots a little girl in a pink dress. Her orange hair sticks out in two little pigtails and for a moment, Kageyama wonders if she’s lost. He loses sight of her the next second and pays her no mind. She’ll find her mother soon.

Shuffling over to the gates, Kageyama discovers that not only does his train pass no longer work, but that he has, impossible though it sounds, been pickpocketed.

Which means no money. The change in his pocket isn’t enough for a ticket to get home. _Fuck._

He tries calling Oikawa a couple of times but to no avail and Kageyama is convinced it’s because Oikawa is a petty asshole.

He’s ready to leave and perhaps wait for Oikawa to call him back, or call his only other friend, Sugawara, and ask him to tell Oikawa to call him back. He sits down on the bench to contemplate his now sucky situation when the whispers around him start.

“Who’s that girl?”

“Why is she all alone?”

“Someone should get her away from the train tracks.”

Kageyama looks up to see the little girl from earlier, carefully walking along the train tracks, her hands outstretched and a tiara placed precariously on her head.

“One, two, three…” 

If you asked Kageyama later, he doesn’t think he could tell you exactly what happened. He could hear the train. He ran towards the tracks and held an arm out to the girl.

“Grab my hand!” he yelled.

And when she did, he pulled her up just as the train pulled in. Kageyama didn’t let go of her even when the train door opened up and the station was busy once again. A few people looked over in concern, but none stopped by. Only when the train pulled away from platform 8 did Kageyama let go of the little girl.

She looked ready to cry.

_Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry don’t—_

Tears flow down her little face.

“Hey, don’t cry. Are you OK? Look, what’s your name? Where’s your mother?” Kageyama had hoped the questions would stop the little girl from crying. _No luck._

People were starting to swarm onto the platform to wait for the next train, and Kageyama’s mind instantly went to milk. Maybe milk will calm her down.

“Hey, come on, let’s go. What flavour do you like? I’ll get you some milk and then we’ll look for your mother, OK?” This was said in the most placating, reasonable tone Kageyama could muster but the girl clearly wasn't in the mood to be reasoned with and just latched on to his hand. 

Today _sucked._

He stops at the vending machine just outside the station and gets her chocolate milk. _Kids like chocolate, right?_

Shifting his cardboard box from one hand to the other, he hands the drink to the little girl and sits down next to her on the floor. He sighs. _Should he take her to the police or try looking for her mother? Why hasn’t Oikawa called back yet? Will the rain ever stop?_

In the midst of his interrogation with himself, he hears a small and sniffly 'I lost my tiara.'

He looks at the little girl and wonders how young one would have to be for their biggest concern to be a lost tiara.

“What,” he says, kind of stupidly. The girl stares back at him as if he was stupid.

“I lost my tiara. A princess _never_ loses her tiara. I want to go _home_.” She sniffles a little and Kageyama prays to whatever deity is listening for her to not cry.

“I…OK, I’ll make you a deal. We’ll look for your tiara if you tell me your name and where you saw your mother last.” Kageyama hopes this is the right way to deal with kids. _Bargaining._

“My name is Natsu. I’m the princess of Karasuno, my big brother’s kingdom. I want to go back.” She pauses for a moment, looking down at her milk carton. “I don’t have a mother.”

Kageyama doesn’t know what to make of any of the sentences that came out of Natsu’s mouth. He wasn’t going to question her (like a responsible adult should) because she looked ready to cry again, so naturally, he said, “right. Karasuno. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that. It’s not on the map…” Kageyama trails off. _Was it on the map? He’d never been good at geography._

“I want to go home!” Natsu is crying now. Great. He’d made the kid cry. _Again._

At this point, all Kageyama could do was not scream out in frustration. This kid was beginning to get on every single one of his nerves. He had to be hallucinating, right?

“Where…where is Karasuno?” Kageyama asks, hoping to placate Natsu.

“It’s…” she pauses, “I’m not sure,” she says quietly.

“What do you mean you're not sure?” Kageyama wants to go to _bed._

“I want my tiara! I can only tell you then! I can’t do magic without it!”

Magic. _Right. Of course._

“I don’t have a tiara.”

“That’s why _you can’t do magic._ ” Natsu pouts at him.

For the sake of peace, Kageyama drags the cardboard between them and says, “let’s see what we have here. I don’t have money to buy you one, anyway.”

“What’s money?”

Kageyama considers it. _Was Natsu too young to learn about economics and the evolution of the barter system? Did her kingdom even have transactions for goods and services? The supply and demand laws were pretty universal, right? What kingdom doesn’t have the concept of money?_

_Wait. Kingdom?_ Kageyama was officially beginning to lose it. He digs through the box, shuffling papers and pencils around until he finds…

A flower crown. A cheap, plasticky, garishly blue flower crown.

Kageyama picks it up and glares at it, and if it could grow a mouth and apologise for its existence, it would. It must be Kunimi’s, from that one time Kindaichi’s niece came to work with him and insisted on making one for Kunimi. This will have to do. He doesn’t want to question why he has it.

“Here you go,” he says plopping it on Natsu’s head. It (predictably) looks hideous, blue against Natsu’s orange hair. She doesn’t seem to mind it, though.

She smiles up at him with the intensity of a thousand suns and shuts her eyes. Her brows furrow close together and Kageyama feels slightly nauseous. He could almost swear the temperature rises by a couple of degrees and dies down when Natsu opens her eyes again. She’s no longer smiling.

“It’s far,” she says faintly, with an air of defeat. Kageyama doesn’t like it.

“How far?”

“Very. You don’t have dragons here, do you?” she asks hopefully.

“Er, no. We have trains, though. If you could tell me where exactly…” Kageyama gets up to go to the kiosk to get them a map.

“Yeah, if you could point out where it is…”

Natsu looks at the map with extreme concentration.

“It’s not here.”

Kageyama doesn’t know what he expected form a child who didn’t know what money was.

“Right, to the police station we go.” Kageyama doesn’t know why he’d humoured this kid for so long.

“What’s that?” Natsu asks.

“They’ll help you look for…your home. Wherever that is.”

“Why can’t you help?”

“Because.”

“Because what?”

“I can’t, OK? I just can’t, I don’t even know if you’re telling the truth.”

“Are you calling me a liar?” Natsu looks hurt and furious and Kageyama almost feels like a terrible person, a villain of sorts, when Natsu suddenly says, in the most serious child voice, “I, the princess of Karasuno, command you, stranger, to help me find my way home.”

Suddenly, Kageyama can’t say _no._

Not because Natsu was a cute child, or because he was a kind hearted person deep down inside, although both those things are true.

It was, for Kageyama’s lack of vocabulary, _magic._

They plan. Kageyama tells Natsu he doesn’t have ‘money’ and therefore can’t get on the train. Natsu sucks on her thumb in concentration until Kageyama tells her about the ‘ticket’.

“What does it look like?”

Kageyama tells her. And she conjures it out of nowhere. She also looks tremendously tired and Kageyama is suddenly a little afraid. Natsu was, after all, a child. Tickets in hand at the platform he asks, “Does it tire you out when you do magic?”

“Yes. I haven’t made anything out of air, ever. This is my first time! My teacher, Akaashi-sensei will be so happy when I tell him! It makes me very tired, I think I’ll sleep now.” And just like that, she does, and Kageyama is forced to carry her. He doesn’t get many looks, thankfully. He does hear a middle aged lady tell her friend, “look at that boy, he’s carrying his sister home from school. How lovely.”

Sister, right. Because they look exactly alike.

“What’s your name?” Kageyama hadn’t noticed that Natsu was awake, instead choosing to spend his time glaring at his phone and wondering why Oikawa hasn’t replied to his messages.

“Kaegeyama.”

“Kageyama,” she repeats. They sit in relative silence after that for a while, the train taking them to the other side of the city. At least, that had been the plan until Natsu had screeched, “it’s here, it’s here!” five minutes from the last stop.

Kageyama had hurriedly picked her up and gotten off at the station and run out. It was still raining. They didn’t have an umbrella. Natsu was tugging at his sleeve and telling him to _go that way, Kageyama-san!_

Today had sucked. He wasn’t doing anything in the near future anyway. 

Why not this.

**Author's Note:**

> yeah who knows maybe this will be a longfic (??????) natsu needs to get home !!! what is shouyou up to? who else has a cameo? when will the next update be? why is kageyama ooc?
> 
>  
> 
> i have no answers enjoy friends


End file.
